This is the second ‘Barrattification of Britain’ article which set HemingwayDesign off on its now two-decade long urban design and housing adventure. It was the Barratification and Wimpeyfication of Britain tirades that resulted in Wayne Hemingway being asked to appear on Newsnight in a debate with national housebuilders. Immediately after that we were approached by […]

The future of retail needs a radical rethink, and fast. High streets need to be multi-purpose, multi-use, reflective of local context and relevant to the way people are now consuming. We believe the future is bright for our town centres, for they are the beating heart of the community. We believe that recent store closures […]

Everyone missed festivals and events in summer 2020, but boy did we miss them at HemDes. We’ve established and are involved in 7 cultural festivals across the country, and usually summer for us is those every weekend plus our London-based design-led markets happening around the year, making for a busy events team and a packed […]

With 40 years in the industry, two generations, 100s of projects completed, millions of people involved, engaged and entertained, we felt it was time for a brand refresh that reflects who we are now. The thing is that we’re brand consultants ourselves. We develop brand narratives, we work on values and purpose, we collaborate on […]

On Covid and the future of cities When I moved to London in 1979 the population was 6.75 million. England’s capital city had experienced a decline from 8.9 million over 4 decades (see graph here). A heady cocktail of air pollution (there was even a song called A Foggy Day (In London Town), by Gershwin […]

Wayne’s experience with a new all electric car I read this this week “Boris Johnson is expected to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles this autumn with the announcement, one of a string of new clean energy policies to help trigger a green economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.”   Here’s my personal ‘move to electric […]

A response to Boris Johnson’s “Build Build Build” mantra My (increasingly bushy) eyebrows raised somewhat last week when Boris Johnson stood in front of his podium with his latest three worder “build, build, build” and his promise to cut red tape around infrastructure – and raised even further when the chancellor promised to cut stamp […]

The lockdown got us thinking about some big stuff like globalisation. Prior to Covid-19 rearing its ugly head, there had already been much discussion about issues with globalisation. The seemingly unstoppable march of national economies, coming together as one global economy, for the ultimate benefit of the world. Globalisation appeared to tick boxes on all […]

Musings on the first lockdown, creativity and the future of public space.  It’s now almost 40 years since we started our design business and perceptions of the creative industries have changed hugely over that time. I grew up in a household where my mum and my nan were always making clothes and my pop was […]

Disposable fashion is an awful concept. By the time you read this the UK will have been under lockdown for roughly one week, and our lives as we know them have been drastically changed. We don’t know how long it will last before these restrictions start to ease off, but it has me wondering whether […]

Did you know that twice as much land in the UK is given to golf courses as to housing? Wayne went on Wake Up To Money on BBC Radio 5 Live in July 2019 to talk about the state of housing in Britain, and what we can do to improve communities in the future. You […]

Until now, this would’ve been met with cries of ‘bang goes the neighbourhood’. Charity shops popping up on high streets have long been seen as a sign of a town’s demise – sitting alongside pound shops, greasy takeaways and long-empty units who’s previous owners were victims of austerity, or Brexit, or universal credit, or whatever […]

Beto O’Rourke has made headlines this week by announcing his intention to run as Democratic Presidential candidate in 2020, and then smashing records by raising $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign. What’s interesting to me about this is that Beto is a so-called ‘ex punk’ who used to play bass in […]

The definitive history of Blackburn is Open and the build up to The National Festival of Making. In 2012, we had the idea to take what Blackburn had – empty shops in prime town centre locations, an open minded Council, unused evocative buildings, strong industrial heritage, successful diaspora – and embrace these assets to start […]

We are all for localism when it truly serves the best interests of the local community. I recently read that Preston has been named as the UK’s most improved urban area in a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and think-tank Demos and was cheered by the fact that a town I know and love is doing well. […]

The UK builds some of the smallest homes in Europe and this greed must be stopped in its tracks. The average house has lost 20% of its space since the 1970s as austerity warps planning processes and greed rules the market. On any given week, if you can bear to look, you’ll see dispiriting news […]

Witnessing the power of driven and passionate individuals getting things done when it comes to regeneration. We have a significant portfolio under our belts of delivered / completed, impactful regeneration and urban design projects and I am often asked “what is the key to good design and the original good principles not being ‘value engineered’ […]

Our town centre thinking continues… This week it’s the turn of another so called “retail institution” the House of Fraser to announce a significant store closure following a shrinking of Mothercare and the demise of the likes of Maplin’s, Toys R Us and a whole raft of retail “brands” (that often actually has done the […]

The opportunity to design a housing development in Blackburn was something that energised Gerardine and Wayne. I often get asked for my career highlight and my answer for the past decade or so has been The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead, our first housing development. It was one of those rare projects that, despite the […]

We can tend to be utopian but a divided society serves no-one. Britain is divided in a number of ways and if it continues then everybody will suffer. Between Remainers and Leavers, environmentalists and climate change-deniers, misogynists and feminists, the curious and the ignorant and the haves and have-nots, we’re at risk of tearing ourselves […]

We hate betting shops and the misery they cause.  For the past few years I have been including this image in my urban design talks and arguing that it’s time we either introduce planning legislation that allowed councils to ban betting shops altogether, or restrict them to one per square mile. Initially my views were […]

Wayne was made a Mayor of London Design Advocate, and has been an advocate for celebrating the city’s suburbs.  I had been thinking about what Good Growth in London means to me and it came to me during this recent sweltering spell of weather in London when I was struggling to sleep, getting up at […]

Music flows through HemingwayDesign, and here is a blog that documents Wayne’s eclectic tastes. For more, visit Wayne’s mixcloud. We have a special Memory Tape this week from designer Wayne Hemingway who has hand-picked tracks from the year 1983, the year he set up his first clothing factory in Blackburn, Lancashire. The tape was made to […]

A blog about how affordable rents helped us get started and how through the markets we curate we are, in a small way, helping start-ups “have a go” by providing low cost opportunities.  I grew up in modest background to the sound of whirring sewing machines and with a mum and a nan who always […]

We have always called for the housing industry to not be dominated by the large / mega-scaled housebuilders like Taylor Wimpey, Barratts and Persimmon.  The housing crash of 2008 devastated the small and medium sized housebuilding sector resulting in today just 26% of new homes being built by this part of the housebuilding industry as […]

Improving equality and life chances for the younger generations have always been hugely important to us. Growing up in the 60s and the 70s my guess is that most young people in normal working class communities like the ones Gerardine and I came from in North East Lancashire had the belief that if they rolled […]

Improving equality and life chances for the younger generations have always been hugely important to us. I like many have been seeing the signs over the past few years that there is a generation, that, for the first time is worse off than their parents. It was the norm for people of my generation to […]

I was asked to film a polemic for the This Week programme to go on the BBC tonight but it has been subsequently dropped because of Boris Johnson’s announcement that he will now not stand for PM. Even though it does have some of the content from the EU referendum blog that we published last […]

Wayne shares his post European Union referendum blues. Three days after the announcement of the EU Referendum result, I still feel totally and utterly down. The only other time in my life that I have felt like this was when my dear mum died. However I was prepared for that, I had had time to […]

Brexit and building the right kind of homes get an airing here. Its 7 am and I have just come back from running with my dog Minnie in my local London park and am feeling conflicted. Over the past few months the numbers of rough sleepers in the park has increased substantially. They are not […]

We did our bit for the remain in the EU campaign and are still saddened by the result. I honestly didn’t imagine that the UK would get to a position where it is possible that we pull away from Europe. But this weekend’s polls show the “Leave” campaign 3 percentage points ahead. It makes no […]

You don’t make change by taking the easy route. Having been following the furore surrounding the planned Garden Bridge over the Thames and it’s got me wondering. At HemingwayDesign are we suckers for projects that have conjecture surrounding them or is it that the most impactful projects are often immersed in significant difficulties? When I […]

Our punk history…say no more. I am lucky to have been a music and fashion obsessed 15 year old when punk broke in 1976. Whilst the early 70s were exciting for a teenager who liked to dance, with Bowie, Roxy, T Rex, Northern Soul and funk spoiling us for choice, punk was something else. This […]

A young Kate Moss and low cost housing all in one blog. A couple of weeks ago we posted the above photo on the HemingwayDesign Facebook page of a housing development, The Bridge Dartford that we led the design and master planning of a decade or so ago. The comment posted by user Paul Read […]

Returning to an old chestnut – secondhand clothing and the circular economy. I love fashion (well I would with my background). I love looking at each new seasons mens and womenswear collections. But I stick with looking and very very rarely buy any new clothes (except undies and socks). I have a wardrobe (or 6) full […]

As Wayne hit 55 in 2016 he wrote about how “oldies” don’t go stale. When you get to my age (55) you start to hear about friends and family of a similar age “slowing down”, going part time or taking early retirement. I have been in situations where people have indirectly accused me of being […]

Questioning planning orthodoxy is what we do and have always done.  Most housing developments we work on at HemingwayDesign have a “mixed use” element. “Mixed use”, in simple terms, means “a development that blends a combination of residential and commercial, cultural, leisure services, institutional, or industrial uses”. In terms of good urban design practice, in […]

What have two much maligned places – Blackburn and Leicester – got in common? Hope through football. Like many people I root for the underdog. I rejoice when a system that increasingly favours generationally accumulated wealth is successfully negotiated by someone with fresh ideas, desire and “elbow grease”. In sport I love “Roy of The […]

Universal Basic Income and the passing of David Bowie in one blog? You bet. This weekend I was getting myself in a mood about how difficult it seems for young people to start up with the carefree abandon that Gerardine and I had when we set out on our journey at the turn of the […]

Wayne talks about Bowie’s influence on his life and career. If I am asked to name one artist that has influenced my career then it’s never something I have to rack my brains about; there is one that, for me, has always stood head and shoulders above anyone else. I can track my decision back […]

Our appreciation of the history of council housing and its value to society. In 2014 I was reminded of my first Blackburn home by Sarah Thompson who emailed me with her proposal for an interiors book about ex-council houses. When someone emails you with an idea for a book about how a new generation are […]

We started 2016 campaigning as we always do. Image taken from the Guardian The front page headline on the New Year’s Eve edition of the Guardian last week was:“Revealed: house builders sitting on 600,000 plots of land.“ This is part of the sorry UK house building situation that has been a contributing factor to housing […]

We have been fortunate to work with some creative and cultural icons. Sir Peter Blake is a true gent and good egg, as well as being an artist that will live forever.  I went to the official opening of Coriander Studios new printworks a couple of weeks and ended up eating with Sir Peter Blake. […]

Crap architects get a mouthful in this blog from 2015. When it comes to working out the value of the creative industries, much to the chagrin of some architects, the value of the work coming out of architectural practices is not included. My hobby is running (often with my dog Minnie) and when I am […]

We have always believed that anyone can have design ideas and contribute to a great end result, regardless of background or training – after all, a number of us at HemingwayDesign have no formal design training. In recent years we’ve partnered with brands who approached us to redesign their uniforms. This has led us to […]

As you would imagine we are interested in and have a passion for the history of fashion. Here we show some historical pics of Wayne and shamelessly big up a book we put out. I am loving the new book; The Bag I’m in: Underground Music and Fashion in Britain 1960-1990 by Sam Knee. It documents […]

A decade and a half after we started to bemoan the state of new build housing in the UK, there is still a need to be noisy on this subject matter. It’s over 15 years ago since I coined the phrase the “Wimpeyfication and Barrattification of Britain” and started to publically criticise Britain’s mass housebuilding industry for […]

We opened our mouths on societal issues in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and carried on right through the 2010s.  “Corbyn wants to take us back to the 70s of strikes and rubbish piled in the streets”, has been one the hysterical cries from the bullying Sun and other gutter press who seem intent on trying […]

No fence sitting here at HemDes. It seems to be that almost every newspaper and every radio commentator is saying that the V&A are wrong for declining to accept and show Margaret Thatcher’s clothing on the grounds that it was not art, craft or of sufficient design quality. The argument for displaying her stuff at […]

In 2015 we continued to discuss and document our positivity about the evolution of town centres, as a more indie and experiential spirit started to replace the dinosaurs that continued to fail and cease trading.  I have “mouthed off” pretty regularly these last few years about the future of our high streets – one recurrent […]

A bit of our secondhand and circular economy history re-visited in 2015. It was the turn of the 80s and Gerardine (my girlfriend and future wife) and I were new to London from Lancashire. We were having fun – records, clothes, nightclubs – and we just fell into our business all thanks to a market. […]

In 2015 we shouted about our love of the design thinking and process behind a new national flag of New Zealand I have harped on for many years about how the power of design to impact positively on our lives and even to engage in politics is underrated. I grew up at a time and […]

The story of the creation of the Festival of Thrift which turns 10 years old in 2022  In 2011 Gerardine and I were introduced to a chap called John Orchard. He was part of a group of investors who had taken on the enormous, 2 million square foot, Paton & Baldwin’s knitting yarn factory in […]

We’ll take any chance to pop back to one of our favourite projects. I popped into our first housing development The Staiths South Bank in Gateshead in early October 2015, almost 15 years after we first started to design it. Gerardine and I have often wondered if it is the highlight of our careers. Not […]

We are not afraid to speak out and say it like it is Very sad at the moment how decent folk in the public eye are increasingly being vilified in the popular press. I abhor the way Charlotte Church is being treated after she was brave and full of passion for a fairer society on […]

Wayne has always loved Blackburn, the town he grew up in, and in many ways made him, where we “give back to” whenever we can. Published in the Guardian on 25th August 2015 As a Blackburnian it’s great to hear that the town has been named the best place in Britain to make a living. […]

Oh how we hate this selling of new homes in London to “buy to leave empty” investors overseas. This is a plea to the Mayor of London to do something about it. Read The Guardian’s news story, 200 Flats Worth £140m Sold In Just Four Hours and the Independent’s take on it here. Surely it should be seen […]

In 2015, we were just about to launch our Transport for London staff uniform. At HemingwayDesign when we started designing the new London Transport uniform to a brief of “make the team more recognisable on platform, on concourses, in ticket offices, and for the uniform and wearer to take pride in an internationally recognisable brand but […]

In July 2015 we took a Guinness World Record off Mexico City A year ago I was asked by Culture Liverpool if I was interested in directing a weekend of celebrations to mark the 175th anniversary of the first Transatlantic passenger crossing from Europe to Halifax, Boston and New York. On 4th July 1840 a small […]

But so much more yet to come… After 4 years of working on the Dreamland Margate project, after so many false starts and times when we thought that some of the enormous obstacles that presented themselves could in fact be insurmountable, the first phase of this amazing community instigated project is open. The June 2015 […]

At HemingwayDesign we work in a number of towns and cities that have suffered economically and socially over the past decades and I occasionally attend round table discussions or conferences in these towns that focus on regeneration. There is no fairy dust (as Oliver Wainwright said about what we do, possibly snidely, see here) to be sprinkled, […]

We all have “People Power” if we get together and campaign.  One of my favourite slabs of 7” vinyl in my record box is People Power by Billy Paul. I believe that active and vocal communities can bring a sense of empowerment to the wider community and can engender positive change and make things happen that […]

Our first brand Red or Dead was nothing if not purposeful, and we have continued to be a voice for ethical fashion. Last week I attended a screening of the new documentary True Cost and took part in a Guardian Live post-screening panel, chaired by journalist Lucy Siegle, who is one of the film’s executive producers. […]

We have been known to dream… There are have been some wonderful life enhancing tech start-ups over the past few years. Airbnb and Uber have changed, for the better, the way I consume travel and getting about. But there is one that every time I go running in a town or city gets me thinking. […]

I keep seeing those “rent to own” shops selling boring furniture and sparkly electronics on our High Streets and am intrigued and worried by this return to a retail concept led by Radio Rentals and Granada (sing along now, “Great service, great sets, that what you get…at Granada” that seemed to suffer a slow death in the […]

From day one we supported the idea that London with its fabulous network of green spaces could be a National Park. Now it is. I have been following and become increasingly intrigued about the campaign for London to become a National Park. Uniquely combining a biodiverse landscape with nature reserves, parks and gardens, the Greater […]

HemingwayDesign spend most of our time working on projects outside of London, and we have always had a lot to say about Levelling Up.  For too long the media and often the politicians and the residents of regions and cities have been bemoaning the perceived dominance of London. But there is a wind of change […]

A recurring theme – bravery is one of the most important aspects of regeneration. Last week I was tasked with giving a talk on: “Bravery and a can do attitude” at the Somerset County Council’s Staff Awards. The premise being that with all the cutbacks in central government funding, these are hard times for councils.  […]

We are excited about Margate as Dreamland, the project we led on, is about to open. Last year I wrote about some words about Margate that were published on the Design Council website.  Margate  A seaside town that the press often depicts as a bit of a basket case. I have one word for it: […]

We love working in places that open our eyes to the world. We fell in love with Derry / Londonderry working on the team helping the city become the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013. I was first invited over to Derry-Londonderry in 2012 to advice on the build up to their City of […]

Our thoughts on housing and disability  We talk a lot about how many homes there are in the UK. We know we urgently need to build more affordable homes in the right locations because they’re essential for a balanced, productive and happy society. But we talk a lot less about what kind of homes we […]

Here we reclaim the much maligned term “hipster” and sing their praises for their contribution to regeneration.  The word hipster is much maligned. The media has helped turn a sector of young folk who are interested in new things and being a bit different – someone who in the past might have been described as […]